Portals are used to aggregate content, such as applications and web pages (or portions of web pages). Thus, a portal page may appear to a user as a single web page, when in fact it is an aggregation of different portal content elements, with a first part of the portal page displaying a first portal content element, a second part of the portal page displaying a second portal content element, and so on. For example, published U.S. Patent Application No. 20070078705 describes a system for screening and filtering e-commerce content, using a portal to present the data.
In many web-based applications, security protocols are important. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,881,225 discloses a role-based authorization system for controlling access to certain functions in a computer system. Portals are no exception to the requirement for security, and portals therefore frequently implement security and authorization protocols to control which users will have access to which content elements. U.S. Pat. No. 6,412,073 discloses a portal which aggregates and presents links to secure websites, and also stores and manages login and password information so that when a user selects one of the links, the user can access the content without having to log in manually.
Like other web pages, a portal is typically accessed through a network, including but not limited to the Internet, by means of a single, unique uniform resource locator (URL). When any particular user accesses the portal using the portal's unique URL, the portal page that is returned will only include those portal content elements that the user is permitted to view based on his or her authorization (typically a user ID and a password), although all such elements will typically be included. For example, a user who is a member of Group 1 may be permitted to view all content within the portal, but a user who is a member of Group 2 may only be permitted to view certain portal content elements. This can create problems when using a search engine to search for content in portals.